Xi’s Name Appears, Then Disappears, in Chinese TV Costume Drama

Xi Jinping's Name Appears, Then Disappears in a Chinese Drama

Just days before China’s National People's Congress session, the names of President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and a few other former top officials briefly appeared on a scroll in a popular historical TV drama set in ancient China — and not in a positive light.

Did the makers of a historical drama set in ancient China sneak in a reference to President Xi Jinping–and in a less-than-honorable light?

Such speculation has swirled around the popular television series “The Qin Empire 3,” about the rise of imperial China’s first dynasty more than two millennia ago. A recently aired episode about the bitter stalemate between the rival kingdoms of Qin and Zhao shows a Qin spy unrolling a bamboo scroll listing Zhao officials thought to be susceptible to bribery.

Six of the names, while written in an ancient and not easily legible script, are familiar ones in China: Xi Jinping, Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, Li Changchun, Li Keqiang, and Jia Qinglin.

Messrs. Hu and Wen were president and premier respectively from 2003 to 2013. Li Changchun and Mr. Jia were members of the Communist Party’s top decision-making body for a decade until late 2012. Li Keqiang is the current premier, China’s No. 2 leader.

The scene aired in late February, according to one viewer who saw it on television and another who watched it on a video-streaming app. And it briefly caused a fleeting stir on social media. Discussions of the scene among some eagle-eyed viewers disappeared from Chinese social media.

The offending shot has been removed from online versions posted on commercial platforms in China, though it’s still available on some outside.

State broadcaster China Central Television, which aired the drama, didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did China’s television regulator and Youku, a streaming site that carried the drama. Another streaming site that ran the episode, iQiyi, declined to comment. The series director didn’t respond to requests for comment, and an administrative staffer reached at the production company, Xi’an Qujiang Qin Empire Cultural Propagation Co., said he wasn’t aware of the matter.

The sensitivity of the stunt, no matter how fleeting the shot, is obvious to those that noticed.

“Looks like The Qin Empire’s going to banned from broadcast,” read the title of a discussion thread on a Chinese internet forum, which has since been censored by forum administrators.

Mr. Xi has run a withering crackdown on corruption in his four years as China’s top leader. Being identified as an official from Zhao is also politically charged since the phrase “members of the Zhao family” is used today among politically minded Chinese as a euphemism for the wealthy and powerful.

The episode ran just days before China kicked off its annual legislative session on Sunday, one of the most public political events of the year. This year’s session comes ahead of a twice-a-decade leadership shuffle in the fall, raising the pressures on the leadership to display unity in public while they engage in behind-the-scenes horse-trading.

The offending shot had appeared on Chinese video-streaming service iQiyi, said Beijing-based writer Cui Tianti, who downloaded the episode onto her phone on the day it was released. Another viewer, an online-retailing executive based in the central city of Changsha, said he saw the shot aired by CCTV.

Both said they hadn’t noticed anything unusual about the scene with the scroll.

The shot no longer appears on versions of the scene available on the iQiyi, Youku and CCTV websites. A copy of the original episode uploaded to U.S.-based video-hosting service Vimeo was taken down on Friday after China International Television Corp., a unit of CCTV, filed a complaint over copyright infringement, according to a notice on Vimeo.

Versions of the scene on Chinese commercial streaming sites now feature what seems like a jumpy edit: A view of the Qin spy picking up the scroll is immediately followed by a shot of the back of the scroll with the spy reading it. A shot of the scroll, seen over the spy’s shoulder with the namelist visible, has disappeared.

On a version of the scene hosted on Chinese video-streaming website Youku, viewers wrote comments referring to the deleted namelist shot. “Look closely,” one viewer wrote. “There’s an obvious edit made at the point when the scroll was being unrolled.”

Copies of the original scene can still be found. One such copy, downloaded from video-streaming service iQiyi by Ms. Cui on the day it was released, was reviewed by China Real Time. Another copy was uploaded onto the French-owned video-hosting website Dailymotion on Feb. 27. –the day when the same scene was originally aired by CCTV, according to a broadcast schedule. (The scene with the scroll starts at around the 20-minute, 20-second mark).

The original episode was first uploaded onto the CCTV website on Feb. 27, according to a version of that webpage cached by Google, but has since been taken down. The altered version of that episode reappeared on the CCTV website on March 2, according to the time stamp on the new video.

“The Qin Empire 3″ is the third season of a popular television franchise adapted from a historical novel by Sun Haohui, set during the Warring States period that stretched roughly from the 5th to 3rd centuries B.C. According to local news reports, the latest series was shot in 2011 and was originally scheduled for broadcast in 2015, before delays due to editing requests from censors pushed its release to this year.

–Chun Han Wong, with contributions from Kersten Zhang and Lilian Lin. Follow him on Twitter @ByChunHan.